God Wants to Consume You

God wants to consume you with a burning fire, but not the one you may think.

God’s desire for you is that you would be consumed by Him.

His love rages for you as a passionate inferno which refuses to be quenched until He has subdued every part of your being.

He is jealous for you and will not rest until you are so engulfed in the flames of His love that everything else in life is incidental by comparison.

The point to be understood isn’t that you should experience the same thing as others have experienced.  God’s expression of love for His bride is universal, yet at the same time it is deeply personal and unique to each of us.

The key is in understanding that God has a burning love not just for people  in general, but for you specifically.

It isn’t enough to simply acknowledge intellectually that God loves you. To restrict God’s love to the intellect alone will greatly limit our ability to enjoy Him.

The raging fire of His love seeks to permeate your mind, your emotions, and your will. Then, having ravaged your soul, His love will leap from your life, through your actions, onto those around you, like a fire that jumps from one tree in the forest to another.

God wants His love to invade every part of our being.

A balanced life is one in which we clearly understand His love intellectually, deeply experience His love emotionally and purposefully live out of His love volitionally.

With life in balance, the written word of the Scriptures guides us objectively and the living Word within guides us subjectively. From out of the center of His love, we are then able to live the carefree, abundant life that Jesus Christ came to give us.

Imagine a life in which the fire of God so consumes you that you lose all inhibitions; a life in which you charge forth confidently into every day with the assurance that God will guarantee your success that day. This life isn’t imaginary, it’s real!

When we live from the blazing glory of His love for us, that is the life we can live.

When consumed with the fire of God’s love you can say with the Psalmist, “Our God is forever and ever; He will guide us until death” (Psalm 48:14).

With the confidence of David when he was surrounded and outnumbered in battle by the Philistines, we can shout to the world with assurance, “This I know, that God is for me” (Psalm 56:9)!

- Steve McVey